Why Is Bravo So Obsessed With Fidi?

Intelligencer The Cut Vulture The Strategist Curbed Grub Street Subscribe Why Is Bravo So Obsessed With Fidi? The network’s reality stars—especially on Next Gen NYC—have given the neighborhood an outsize share of screen time. By , an Emmy Award–winning Curbed writer who has reported on New York City for four years Bravo’s Next Gen filmed a kiss on Pier 17, a phone call from the pier’s bench, a date at the Seaport’s Lawn Club, and beers on Stone Street — locations within a ten-minute walk in lower Manhattan. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Bravo Bravo’s Next Gen filmed a kiss on Pier 17, a phone call from the pier’s bench, a date at the Seaport’s Lawn Club, and beers on Stone Street — locations within a ten-minute walk in lower Manhattan. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Bravo Bravo’s Next Gen filmed a kiss on Pier 17, a phone call from the pier’s bench, a date at the Seaport’s Lawn Club, and beers on Stone Street — locations within a ten-minute walk in lower Manhattan. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Bravo Last October, the 31-year-old crypto investor and reality-television star Charlie Zakkour strolled down Beaver Street in the Financial District, trailed by cameras. He was shooting the second season of Bravo’s most-watched reality show, Next Gen NYC, which premiered in 2025 and follows a coterie of models, influencers, and nepo babies, including five children of Real Housewives. Zakkour, the son of a former banking exec, plays the bad boy — flirting with unavailable women, rolling joints on-camera, and making it onto “Page Six” for his cameo in the saga of the crypto torture house. As the cameras followed him through Fidi, he seemed to play up his image as an outlaw: hands in pockets, sunglasses on despite the evening hour. I had a hard time believing in Zakkour-as-bad-boy because I couldn’t take my eyes off the background. He was walking a stretch of my regular commute to New York’s offices from Wall Street’s 2/3 stop. He passed the bodega with the AI slop sign, the long-shuttered and recently reborn Luke’s Lobster, the Joe & the Juice. I have come to love the neighborhood for its unprettified straightforwardness and its proximity to every possible business-related service, from notaries to shoe repair. But it’s not cool, and watching Zakkour swagger through it felt incongruous to me, like seeing Kate Middleton wander around a Six Flags. Zakkour shown playing it cool in Fidi on Next Gen NYC. Photo: Bravo The same location in the harsh light of morning. Photo: Adriane Quinlan I would write him off as an outlier, but a disproportionate chunk of the Bravo reality-TV universe is concentrated in the narrow streets of the Financial District, especially around the South Street Seaport. Other shows on the network, like Summer House and its spinoff, In the City, seem to circle the same streets. Over the course of Next Gen NYC’s season, which ended this past week, the model Ava Dash grabs a slice of pizza on Fulton Street; strolls through the Seaport; and calls her father, the hip-hop mogul Damon Dash, from a bench at Pier 17. There’s a heart-to-heart with her co-star Riley Burruss nearby. A group date that sparks a romance between former child actor Liam Obergfoll and Bravo daughter Ariana Biermann unfolds on the harshly lit Astroturf of the Seaport’s Lawn Club, before Biermann has an illicit kiss with Zakkour a few episodes later and a block away. (Summer House incorporates another date at the Lawn Club.) A party staged for the season finale unfolds at Club Bohemia, the upstairs spot at Pier 17 operated by Gitano NYC, with an after-party at Cowgirl Seahorse, the long-standing Seaport watering hole. Zakkour gets drinks near the Hotel Indigo on Water Street with a business partner and sips beers with Shai Fruchter, his fashion-designer castmate, at one of the wooden tables that make Stone Street the area’s go-to for finance bros after the markets close. Zakkour, a New York native, seems unfamiliar. “This is a cool-ass street,” he says on-camera, gazing around. “Great choice, Shai.” Was it Fruchter’s choice? Why was Zakkour always wandering a neighborhood he seemed to have no basic knowledge of? And, more generally, what are all these people doing down here? Bravo shows Ava Dash grabbing a slice on Fulton Street and strolling through the Seaport. Bravo . Bravo shows Ava Dash grabbing a slice on Fulton Street and strolling through the Seaport. Bravo . Bravo's Next Gen NYC filmed the season finale at Cowgirl Seahorse, a local spot off Peck Slip. Bravo, Adriane Quinlan . Bravo's Next Gen NYC filmed the season finale at Cowgirl Seahorse, a local spot off Peck Slip. Bravo, Adriane Quinlan . Zakkour passes the red umbrellas of Best Sicily Bottega, a popular lunch spot. Bravo, Adriane Quinlan . Zakkour passes the red umbrellas of Best Sicily Bottega, a popular lunch spot. Bravo, Adriane Quinlan . Bravo or otherwise, there is certainly a lot of filming going on. The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment says that the number of permits in Community Board District One, covering Fidi, the Seaport, and lower Manhattan, has risen 8 percent over last year, although it doesn’t break out reality shows from conventional ones (and at least some of those were for The Gilded Age). That’s likely an undercount: The small crews that reality shows tend to use don’t need a permit to film on public sidewalks. Rafael Espinal, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, emphasizes that “for small shoots — reality TV productions and microdramas — you don’t need a permit since you’re not shutting down a street.” An ad filming on Stone Street, which is blocked to traffic. Photo: Adriane Quinlan Both the Seaport Entertainment Group (landlord for the neighborhood’s prime stretch of Belgian blocks) and the Downtown Alliance told me about a spike in shoots for reality shows that started about two years ago — right around the time when Next Gen started filming. And they had theories. The old, narrow streets are not major arteries and are easier to close to traffic when that’s needed. Some, like Stone Street and the end of Fulton Street, are already pedestrian-only. Besides, the area doesn’t read as downtown Cincinnati. “You get waterfront, you get old buildings, you get new buildings — all this kind of quintessential New Yorkness,” said Andrew Breslau, the spokesperson for the Downtown Alliance, pointing out these are the same reasons why On the Town was shot here in 1949, or why generations of directors have used the area for noir and chase scenes. Zakkour taking a call on the East River at Pier 16. Photo: Bravo That’s pretty much what I heard from Lauren Eskelin, an executive producer at Truly Original, who calls the area “very cinematic.” For a finale shot of the Next Gen NYC cast, what backdrop could be better than the span of the Brooklyn Bridge? “We don’t always want to be shooting in apartments or restaurants,” Eskelin said. “We’d rather be filming a phone call out and about. I mean, people walk and talk all the time.” When people are in the background, they happen to look like New Yorkers, since the tourists who come below Canal Street tend to stick to the sights around Broadway. On a Friday afternoon on Water Street, I passed a pack of shirtless male models on a shoot, posing in the parkas of a German clothing brand, with zero tourists ogling the chaos. That would be impractical in Soho and unthinkable in Times Square. Here, Eskelin says, “we don’t have too much of an issue with people stopping and wanting to talk to cast members.” Dash shown on a phone call at the pier. Photo: Bravo That’s a delicate way of saying that the neighborhood, for all its density and height, is still a little underpopulated. “I’m not saying it’s empty — I’m just saying it’s not mobbed like Times Square,” says Jon Wanamaker, the marketing director for the Seaport Entertainment Group. Lower Manhattan has a 20 percent retail-vacancy rate overall, per the Downtown Alliance, and I count four prime spots in the Seaport area with empty windows. A commercial-space agent told me that rents for stores, bars, and restaurants are about half what they are in Soho and around a quarter of what they’d be on prime Fifth Avenue. “It’s the shift to work-from-home,” posits Sydney Acevedo, a manager at the Paris Cafe, a Seaport bistro that appears on multiple Bravo shows but was empty at 5 p.m. on a Friday during Fashion Week. (She says its TV presence hasn’t caused a huge uptick in business, but it’s noticeable: She’s had multiple 20-minute conversations with customers about “Scamanda.”) As businesses that catered to the old wave of office workers closed, Acevedo said, they left “an opening for a new scene to be born.” And who came rushing in to fill the void? “The content creators are really taking over this area,” says Meg Radice, who has about 700,000 followers across her accounts as the VIP List, which she runs with her friend Audrey Jongens. Together, they share a “little creator pack” of Fidi friends — neighbors that include @elizabethfowlerx, @charlithehotdog, @kaitlin_reagan, and @newyorkbyjenny. “I feel like so many creators live down here. I literally have five in my building. Our friend just moved to a new building in Fidi, and there’s already three in her building,” she says. Shai Fruchter and Charlie Zakkour at the tables on Stone Street. Photo: Bravo The stars of Next Gen are part of this tribe, and Eskelin says the cameras just happened to trail them down here. “We are following people in their real life, and this is where a lot of our cast lives,” she says. Emira D’Spain, the beauty influencer, has talked about living in an office conversion on Fulton Street before the show started. Dash recently signed a lease for an apartment in the same building, which she celebrated with a post on Instagram. This week, Dash filmed herself there as she applied a hydrating tube of lip shine in a paid advertisement filmed for her 149,000 Instagram followers. Public records put Zakkour nearby in a sleek, amenity-filled conversion on Water Street, where the cameras often capture him leaving for a meeting or a drink. “Just having a nice apartment for content, people end up seeing more brand deals — because more brands want to tap in. It’s crazy,” says Radice, who arrived in Fidi in 2018, when “it was Chads everywhere,” she said. The pandemic left people bored at home and watching more content, making influencers profitable just as office buildings downtown were starting to turn into rentals with hundreds of residential units, with doormen downstairs who could sign for PR deliveries. The buildings that were opening in the early 2020s also had a look that worked for video: sleek, anonymous, white, and not at all distracting. The typical vlogger does not want East Village walk-up funk. “If you’re a content creator filming in your apartment, the newer finishes look better, for aesthetics,” she says. These bland spaces are also harder to geo-guess: “A lot of creators that don’t live in Fidi always hide their window, because it’s so obvious.” When Fidi influencers do go outside, the city is theirs. “After all the Chads go to work from, like, 10 a.m. to 4, you can walk around looking crazy because it’s pretty empty,” says Radice. “You never have to worry about running into anyone.” The crowds downtown at the Seaport, Pier 16. From left: Photo: Adriane QuinlanPhoto: Adriane Quinlan The crowds downtown at the Seaport, Pier 16. From top: Photo: Adriane QuinlanPhoto: Adriane Quinlan The downside: Radice and her friends have to venture to other neighborhoods at night, sometimes walking up to Tribeca. But when she looked there, she says, the apartments were bleak or too expensive. In Fidi, “You’re getting more square footage, in a brand-new building, for less,” says Emma Davis, an influencer, Fidi resident, and real-estate agent. Bonus square footage tends to show up in residential conversions, she says, where space that can’t legally be a bedroom — windowless, in the core of the building — is ideal for a desk setup or storage for the endless river of PR packages of products. With hundreds of new units in the area, there are usually openings. Nine empty apartments are currently listed on StreetEasy for the building where Next Gen’s Ava Dash seems to be living, and nine more are open in Zakkour’s. One particular downtown building made recent news for its vacancies, and I recognized its distinctive baseboards in a shot of the current season of Real Housewives of New York, as cast member Sai De Silva showed off her new apartment. Are there discounts for on-camera time? Sarah Patton, a Compass agent familiar with the buildings, says that a few years ago, when hundreds of units were being marketed downtown, some buildings were making deals, but that’s rare. “Whatever has come out has been organic, and these people just happen to be leasing.” Davis, the influencer agent, added that the Next Gen stars fit the profile of clients she sees gravitate to Fidi. “A lot of influencers are moving to New York City for the first time,” she says. “Moving into these luxury buildings is an easy way to move into the city.” There’s one other bit of synergetic ease involved here too: Everyone’s close to work. Truly Original and its predecessor companies have been at 180 Maiden Lane since 2016. “Yes, our production offices are right at the crossroads of the Fidi and the Seaport,” says Eskelin. She admits that shooting at some locations has been a matter of expedience: “It’s convenient to get the cameras downstairs and out the morning of a shoot day,” Eskelin says. This perhaps explains why Summer House fans noticed that the cars, heading for a shared summer rental out in Montauk, always seemed to be leaving from the same Fidi corner. Or why Georgia McCann, the hustling New York native, is shown working on her laptop from a bench in 180 Maiden Lane’s lobby. 180 Maiden Lane is operated by Water Street Associates. Its creative clients include Truly Original, which has been producing from the building since 2016. Photo: Adriane Quinlan Georgia McCann takes a call in the lobby of 180 Maiden Lane. Bravo, Adriane Quinlan . Georgia McCann takes a call in the lobby of 180 Maiden Lane. Bravo, Adriane Quinlan . TV shows do not last forever, and at least one of these stars has already moved on. D’Spain, the Next Gen model, said in an interview that she is now living in a building that’s “more central, kind of West Village, Soho, Greenwich Village area. It’s much more buzzy. I can walk outside and go get a glass of wine with my friends.” She could certainly have done that in Fidi, which seems to have nothing but bars in every direction, but the influencers who live here don’t frequent them, say Radice and Jongens. They admit they only go out locally at Casa Cipriani. Leah McSweeney, a former cast member of Real Housewives, also told me she recently left Fidi for Gramercy. She’d moved there for an uncontroversial reason: to be close to good schools. But, she is quick to add, she didn’t leave lower Manhattan because she disliked it. “I loved how empty the area was after five,” she texts while waiting for a flight to Biarritz. “It felt like we owned the neighborhood.” Why Is Bravo So Obsessed With Fidi? Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences. Every product is independently selected by editors. Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. 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